this journal blug

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

From a sleepy stagecoach stop when his family settled there in 1834 to the fastest growing city in Illinois today, Plainfield has long since traded tractors for tract housing. Its population nearly tripled from 1990 to 2000, and doubled again since then, according to census estimates released last week.

But Culver, a self-labeled 75-year-old country boy who still cherishes his copy of the 1906 Sears and Roebuck catalog, is not just a man out of step with this century. He was out of step with the last one too.

In 1975, a Tribune article declared him to be among the last of a dying breed--farmers who work their fields with draft horses, the massive beasts that once pulled everything from plows to streetcars.

Thirty-one years later, Chicagoland farm bureau officials say that Culver is no longer one of the last. He is the last.